Quote Originally Posted by aliG
there's only one problem with your theory. A single 4870 beats the gtx 260. Considering xfire is supposed to scale better than sli and the possible there may be an internal ht bridge or something like that for a fast low-latency inter-connect, then it's safe to say the 4870x2 will be closing in on gtx 280 sli
The HD4870 only beats the GTX260 if you choose your reviews and the games in the reviews and your resolution with great care. OTOH, I could go cherry pick reviews that clearly shows the HD4870 losing badly to the GTX260 in multiple benchmarks. The fact is that the GTX260 and the HD4870 are trading blows. Although in reading reviews from sites that I know and trust the HD4870 seems to be losing by greater margins when it loses than the GTX260 in the games where it loses. Also, it looks to me like the GTX260 has more OC headroom. With an apples to apples water cooled OC comparison I believe the GTX260 OC is going to win against the HD4870 OC in nearly every benchmarks except those few where the HD4870 does unusually well.

Also what is with this CF is "supposed to" scale better than SLI? In the benchmarks I have seen if anything it seems to scale worse and CF is often stated to have worse driver support in games than Nvidia. The game industry has been very Nvidia biased since the 8800GTX took the crown. Hell there was a lot of speculation that AMD/ATI may not even be around anymore due to their huge financial problems which are not even over yet.

The internal HT type bridge idea is extremely speculative. In fact most of the current rumors seem to be that R700 is going to be some sort of crossfire on a card with a faster bridge chip. Remember all the crazy rumors before R600 was released? Some of the rumors were even talking about improved GPU communication IIRC. I suggest we adopt more of a wait and see attitude rather than these type of ultra-optimistic assumptions.